HULL form design and performance evaluation of a Surface Planing Submersible ship (SPS) is presented. SPS is a new kind of multi-mode ship which can sail in planing mode at high speed on the surface and cruse underwater at low speed. A novel ballast channel system is developed to provide quick and easy submerge-emerge process. Hydrofoils are also used to provide dive force as well as motion control surface for SPSS. A finite volume method based CFD method, which takes the influence of dynamic sinkage and trim into account, is used to obtain an good prediction of the hull form resistance as well as a clear simulation of the fluid flow in the ballast channel. Preliminary model tests are also carried through and verify the hull form design and the calculation results.
The SPS, which is known as Surface Planing Submersible ship, is a kind of multi-mode ship. Just as its name implies, this kind of ship can sail both at surface planing mode and submerged cruising mode. It is hard to make sure the first SPS around the world. From 1990s or even earlier, several ship architectures and manufacturers published their own SPS successively, but their initial ideas might exist for a rather long time before the paper publication and patent application. Amnon Talmor (1993) of K10 Corp. obtained a patent of a versatile boat design in 1990s, which was a kind of semi-submersible planing boat. A small series of infiltration boats was then built and tested based on this design for several military forces. Roberts Hjiulback (2004) finished a conceptual design of SPWS (Surface Planing Wet Submersible) as a harbor work boat in his master degree thesis. The wet here means that not only the ballast tanks but the entire hull are flooded during the submerge process and the crews on board need to wear diving gears.
